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New Realism

An Introduction to Introduction to New Realism

Fintan Neylan explains the realism Maurizio Ferraris introduces in his Introduction.

At the opening of his 1907 lecture series ‘Pragmatism’, William James commented on the growing disparity between academic philosophy and a philosophy whose relevance ordinary people would feel in their lives. This latter philosophy would be one which truly mattered to us, James claimed, because it would deal with “our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos” (Pragmatism, 1907). Yet while technical philosophy is found to be wanting in this regard, James had no intention of presenting Pragmatism as sundered from it. Instead he proposes it as a middle road between the two demands, as the subtitle to the published lecture series indicates: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. What James determined was new about Pragmatism was not the ideas per se, but that it presented an alternate way to discuss quite ancient ideas, or, rather, a return to them.

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